Middle and high school teachers across academic disciplines face increased pressure to address the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for English language arts and for literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. This means that the responsibility of preparing students to read, write, talk, and think critically about…

The goal of the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Practice Guide, "Improving Adolescent Literacy: Effective Classroom and Intervention Practices," is to formulate specific and coherent evidence-based recommendations that educators can use to improve literacy levels among adolescents in upper elementary, middle, and high schools. It includes…

This article explains a viable, researched, teaching activity that I call Treasure Hunt. Treasure Hunt is an oral participation, vocabulary lesson that facilitates the transfer of reading comprehension to silent reading. I designed and used this activity with adolescent, challenged readers. The readers had scored below the 70th percentile on a…

How the brain learns to read has been the subject of much neuroscience educational research. Evidence is mounting for identifiable networks of connected neurons that are particularly active during reading processes such as response to visual and auditory stimuli, relating new information to prior knowledge, long-term memory storage, comprehension,…

This article follows the development of three literacy programs that were designed by researchers at Michigan State University to support struggling readers and writers. The literacy interventions focus on strategy instruction in both writing and reading, and they culminate in the development of an integrated reading-writing program to support the…

This newsletter of best practices in implementing the High Schools That Work (HSTW), Making Middle Grades Work (MMGW) and Technology Centers That Work (TCTW) school improvement models is based on presentations at the 27th Annual HSTW Staff Development Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the summer of 2013. The newsletter is divided up into…

In this article, the author discusses top-level structure, a form of text structure that would help students improve their reading comprehension. There are four main organizational patterns, or top-level structures, that occur mostly in factual texts: compare/contrast, cause/effect, problem/ solution, and list-like. Authors often use signaling…

The barbershop is a community institution, one of the most familiar and stable businesses in any neighborhood. Men and boys frequent barbershops, and barbers get to know their customers by name and personality. Boys Booked on Barbershops (B-BOB) is an innovative literacy program designed to make the most of a naturally occurring opportunity: the…

Dominion High School opened its doors in fall 2003 in the highly diverse, fast-growing region of Loudoun County, Virginia, with a student body of nearly 700 students in grades 9-11. A dedicated faculty and a supportive community welcomed students to the school and began working toward a collaborative vision that promoted the success of every…

School administrators across the U.S. are asking literature teachers to become reading teachers, and not surprisingly, many secondary teachers are having difficulty with this transition. The author's transition to reading teacher was hurried by her dissatisfaction with lessons that featured question-answer discussions. Curious about how students…

The Picture It! reading strategy uses the elements of story grammar and visualization in a mnemonic format to enhance comprehension, aid vocabulary development, visually establish story sequence, and stimulate discussion of both the big picture of the story's meaning and the details which support the author's message. It is a strategy that can be…

Readers, texts, and readings can take unpredictable and seemingly tangential detours that educators might find undesirable and difficult to control. Readers can stray far from the text to seek out desired meanings. In the same way, media outlets can reappropriate favorite literary fictions in ways that can perturb educators and readers alike.…

Autism is one of the fastest developing childhood disorders. The increase in the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has been highlighted in the media once again. The prevalence of school-age children with ASD has a considerable impact on the schools and teachers who are responsible for their education. Children with ASD served in the…

In this article, we propose that one way of engaging pre-service and practicing high school Social Studies and English teachers in critical conversations about social class is through the use of life-based literary narratives. By expanding upon Phillion and He's (2004) work around the pedagogical and curricular potential of using life-based…

This working paper explores contemporary research related to methods for teaching reading in Spanish and English in bilingual, foreign language, and English as a second language (ESL) classrooms. Changes stemming from innovations in research and learning are identified and a table is provided to compare methods of teaching reading in Spanish and…